Keep opposing that damn War on Women. If you can figure out where the lines are or ever were. Just under her bust, I’m thinking.

My own definition of hysteria is when people are more interested in emoting about something than doing something about it. (Case in point, Redskins.)

The Ray Rice thing has become a ridiculous circus. Last night, CBS analyst James Brown — yet another Harvard twit — thought it was his place to lecture all men about their responsibility to stem the tide of this guerrilla war on women.

Nonsense. But so is the pushback. Rush Limbaugh is still arguing that all the fuss is part of a liberal conspiracy to take down the NFL. He may be right in that but he’s still missing the point.

Just to begin a real discussion, read this piece from beginning to end. It’s called “The Third Rail of Domestic Violence.”

There is one vital element of the domestic violence dialogue that ignites torrents of unwarranted disapproval: an examination of the dynamic of the women who stay with, and even defend, their attackers.

Attempts to explore what leads otherwise smart women to remain in injurious and possibly fatal relationships is met with bizarre condemnation. A popular reaction has been that this somehow “blames the victims.”

Blames them? This is an attempt to save them.

This is particularly peculiar criticism in view of the fact that there is actual victim-blaming to be found. Amid the week of reaction to Rice’s decking of his then-fiancée, there has been a smattering of observations along the lines of: Did she provoke him? Wasn’t she aware he had a short temper? Shouldn’t women navigate their irascible men with greater skill?

Now that’s victim-blaming, or at least an attempt to pass onto women some responsibility for preventing their own clobberings. It is, of course, nonsense.

But how do we get to a place where it is frowned upon to ask about the abundance of women— some of whom can be found in cemeteries— who keep themselves available for repeated beatings?

Perhaps we are in no mood to impose anything on victims that even looks like an obligation or even a strong suggestion. More likely, we are hesitant to wander into delicate territory in this era of reflexive, contrived offense.

But we must.

We have a societal responsibility to deliver a message to men that women are never, ever a proper target for physical violence… But there is also a vital signal that must be delivered to women: Get out.

This is a message that must be delivered with an understanding of its complexities. Getting out is not always easy. Before we get to the mental pathologies that compel some women to stay willingly, there are plenty of women who would love to make an escape but cannot, at least not immediately.

Their kids are in the house. They have no money of their own. There is no trusted friend or relative nearby. We should always know that our advice to get out of an abusive relationship is fraught with possible obstacles, including an enormous elevation of risk.

The men poisoning these relationships are often unhinged control freaks. If living with them on a daily basis is a hazard, imagine the consequences when the woman decides she’s had it and hits the road. If the exit is foiled or the wayward woman is found, the results can be unspeakable. So let’s not just say “get out” and walk away satisfied with our wise advice.

All true. But there are several other variables — and constants — that need to be taken into account.

Begin with constants. Domestic violence has occurred since the beginning of the human race. Because men and women have violent differences all the time. Often with odd unintended consequences. There has never been (contrary to feminist wishful thinking) a matriarchal society. There have been matrilineal societies, notably the Picts, which passed property through the female line. Pictish girls were routinely married and slain for their property in preteen years. Why there are no more Picts.

The Egyptians and Easter Islanders had similar problems, inheritance customs that led to royal/aristocratic incest and fatal genetic problems.

Another attempted solution to sexual dimorphism was dowries, which continue to thrive in the most primitive Stone Age cultures on earth. Which also leads to resentment and frequent violence, although most commonly female subjugation to the level of near slavery.

So, women owning property and women as property are equally a problem. Female equality might seem to be an answer. But it is, culturally, an enlightenment innovation. Which carries its own unintended consequences. Enter the variables.

Poverty is the most gender leveling thing there is. The woman needs a protector. The man needs a servant and baby maker. It returns us to our Cro-Magnon roots. The second biggest influence is lack of education. When the language of expressing emotion does not exist, violence becomes an earlier resort.

If you do not have words to describe your feelings, you will express your feelings physically.

Both men and women will regard this as appropriate. It becomes, “How we can communicate.” A subject nobody will touch. A fourth rail if you will.

Yeah, there are screwed up middle class white guys who beat their women. But they are fewer, as are the women who expect that and regard it as a normal response. It’s a different case with the poor. They don’t identify their abusers as psychopaths. They regard them as people they can also throw things at and, if need be, cut them up in their sleep. Eleven out of twelve of the most common acts of domestic violence are performed by women. It’s another way of talking.

I, too, am touched by the statistic that one in five American women may have been subjected to domestic violence by a man. But I also know something about statistics. It does NOT mean that one in five men abuses women. Unless you’re hanging onto the idea that all women connect with one man and cleave to him until he kills her.

I can tell you the whole class of “nice guys” is sick to death of the whole bad boy schtick. Why men may not be as upset about domestic violence as James Brown would like us to be. If you seek out people who disrespect and abuse you, precisely because they disrespect and abuse you, maybe our empathy capacity has been damaged.

Consider this:

“6% of women and 4% of men reported having experienced domestic abuse in the past year, equivalent to an estimated one million female victims of domestic abuse and 600,000 male victims”.

Campaigners claim that men are often treated as “second-class victims” and that many police forces and councils do not take them seriously. “Male victims are almost invisible to the authorities such as the police, who rarely can be prevailed upon to take the man’s side,” said John Mays of Parity. “Their plight is largely overlooked by the media, in official reports and in government policy, for example in the provision of refuge places – 7,500 for females in England and Wales but only 60 for men.”

The official figures underestimate the true number of male victims, Mays said. “Culturally it’s difficult for men to bring these incidents to the attention of the authorities. Men are reluctant to say that they’ve been abused by women, because it’s seen as unmanly and weak.”

Still worrying about the one in five women stat? Six percent is not twenty percent. How does that happen?

These days, women have many contacts with men. They have more opportunity to indulge their age-old predilection for bad boys. Bad boys are attractive because they they are bad, get in trouble, ignore the women attracted to them, and, well, beat them when they’re in a mood or something.

Exhibit I. Rihanna chose to return to the thug who did this to her.

She loves Chris. Just like Janay loves Ray.

When women actually get their act together, we nice guys will be glad to work with you about things which MUST be done, including making restraining orders stick, making local police departments care about frightened wives with broken arms and broken noses, and figuring out how to rescue even the moronic fools who think a right cross is something like a kiss. Not to mention shutting up the libs who pretend to protect women when they try to deny threatened women the right to own a protective firearm. Why do you think the term equalizer was ever coined?

Alternatively, learn the English language and your rights under the law. And get yourself a gun for that moment when a restraining order proves itself a mere piece of paper.

Final Note: The players of the NFL are arrested at a lesser rate than the population at large. Same goes for domestic violence arrests. Mostly, they’re decent if imperfect citizens.

Bet you didn’t know that.

Autographed Ray Rice jersey.

I tend to congratulate myself for being right a lot, for being prescient, for having good timing. So it’s only fair that I admit when I’m none of those things.

Last Christmas, I got my wife an autographed Ray Rice jersey. Thought I did good. She went to Rutgers and after the Vick fiasco in Philly she transferred her team loyalty to the Baltimore Ravens.

To be honest, I had mixed feelings about the Ravens. On the one hand, they’re the only NFL team named after a poem. On the other hand, the Ravens are an abomination, the Cleveland Browns stolen from their home in the dead of night and therefore permanently accursed and evil. You know.

I had mixed feelings about Ray Rice too. He went to the NFL before he graduated from Rutgers. I carped about that, blamed the coach, though I understood the hardship argument without fully accepting it. He also couldn’t talk like a college student. “Should of went” is not a locution I countenance in anyone.

But we have season tickets at Rutgers, and we have seen Rice play valiantly many times. We watched him help the Ravens to Super Bowl victory. So I bought the jersey.

It was a matter of only days later that the Atlantic City elevator video surfaced. The one of Rice dragging his unconscious fiancé into the hallway. We were done with him then. There was no need to see what happened inside the elevator.

We were equally disgusted with the two game suspension. One of many reasons why my interest in the NFL is plunging. Why I seared Rush Limbaugh a while ago. I don’t care about political correctness. Hitting women is not a mistake. It’s a mortal sin.

Now my disgust has reached an altogether new level. The video of what happened inside the elevator has generated a ridiculous flurry of “shocked, shocked” reactions. Please. I never needed to see it and have done my best not to see it, in the same way that I have done my best not to watch beheading videos or the compound fracture videos of Joe Theismann or its NBA counterpart a few weeks ago.

But we still have this autographed jersey. Anybody want it? Call it a monument to the prophetic pretensions of yours truly.

If you want it, I’ll mail it to you.

Trophies for showing up. Terrific idea! Love our kids.

The title comes from my wife, who urged this fortune cookie on me this afternoon. Of course you can give up. I do it all the time.

Why am I giving up this time?

1. The world is going to hell in a hand basket.

2. The reason the world is going to hell in a hand basket is Obama.

3. The U.S. Electorate voted this incompetent idiot into office twice.

4. His margin of victory is two demographics without any capacity to change their minds based on anything but fact-free emotion.

5. The young people who are supposed to represent the hope of the future are either gullible fanatics inducted into some monotonic cause or retro Babbits who want a title on the door, regardless of whether the door is locked or on fire.

So. For now I give up. Congratulations, Brizoni. You’ve succeeded in torpedoing my earthly faith at least. The death of Christianity looks like a mighty positive development. Congratulations, Joshua Babbitt. You’re right. Life is really only about you. Tony prep school kids demand your attention first and foremost. Don’t worry. You’ll both get your trophies.

But my wife will be home soon. No doubt the hope generator will be restarted soon.

Ship John Light. Guardian of the Cohansey/Delaware Bay.

Went out there one day. We were maybe 21. In a twelve foot Boston Whaler. Guy who had the con told me it was the dumbest of innumerable dumb things we had done together since teenage, including driving at 125+ speeds on the roads, shooting pistols with no adults around, and water skiing on an eight foot diameter, eighth of an inch thick piece of plywood that could have, and probably should have, sawed us in half like a saw blade. Ship John Light was there because the waters are dangerous. To well rigged eighteenth century sailing ships. Worse for dinghies with two idiots on board.

We survived all of that. We both survived everything.

Except life. Now we’re both recluses. Even from one another. No better friends through our elementary school years — and after an interruption for boarding school — in our late teens and twenties. WE WERE AWFUL. If it had a motor, we would drive it. If the motor was dead, we would revive it with ether. We were monsters.

We always had different talents. He could do anything mechanical. Which is not to demean him. He had an 800 Math board score. I could do other things. You could say we were each other’s friends when no one else would be, and you’d be both right and wrong.

In most ways, we were opposites. He married the most persistent woman, which was — well, isn’t it? — the American Dream. Like the way Jimmy Stewart kept marrying June Allyson. I remained the screwed up romantic, falling for one after another of the wrong women. He had four children. I have had none.

He stayed in the house he was born to, and I travelled widely. He remained the pillar of his father’s business. I did something altogether else.

Yet we both experienced the same kind of pain upon the death of our fathers. He told me his father turned bitter at the end, which I’d never have expected. Just wasted away. Mine wasted away too, from cancer, but I don’t think that was all of it. More. Deeper. And sadder.

We haven’t talked for a long time. He doesn’t approve of me. For oh so many reasons. His reclusiveness is different from mine. But exactly the same.

I think I can guarantee you all now, we both drive like little old ladies these days, and if we had our preference, we’d let our wives do it for us. If they knew what they were doing. His always had a tendency to ignore the speed limit in residential zones. Mine still tailgates on the Turnpike. The Two-Second Rule does not compute with math majors. Go figure.

It’s much much better to stay home.

Don’t look like me.

I know. You think I don’t know. I’m the eternal outsider. But after ten years together, I have to take some responsibility for my wife’s children and grandchildren. Not a lot of responsibility. Just being nice. They’re all awful. Starting with the great grandchild. He’s a bruiser. His daddy’s a veteran. His mommy is small. I haven’t met him yet. But I’ll be resentful for sure.

Which leads to my first rule of grandfathers.

1. Don’t overdo the love babies thing. Babies do lots of disgusting things. When their moms ask you to hold them, plead frailty.

Unfortunately in this day and age, grandchildren are likely to come in assorted ages. I have one who is so mean and selfish that she reminds me of me. And she’s not even Scottish. Though she’s six. Which is the exact emotional age of most Scottish men. Thank God she’s Irish. But. She’s so predictable, she manipulates everyone, stares at me until I stare back at her, which makes her giggle, leading to Rule two.

2. Horrifyingly nasty granddaughters need to be teased, stared at, and told what to do.

I know it sounds impossible. It isn’t. Take it from me, Instapunk. My granddaughter thinks I’m really cool. She peeled pistachio nuts for me last week. Two for him, one for me, she announced. I told her she was okay.

3. Teenage granddaughters turn into women overnight. But the older you get, the more you remember they’re still little girls.

Have a college girl granddaughter. I think she likes me because I’ve actually tried to talk with her. Successfully. But to me she still seems fourteen. So I disapprove of all her boyfriends automatically, and she’s able to bridge the gap because she calls me Robert.

You know what, though? I’ve told her exactly what my hopes and fears are for her regarding education. And she listened. She’s getting A’s now, but I fret about her living alone at home in the old neighborhood.

There’s a grandson or two too. One too old to think of any connection. But I think we might be moving toward at least a rapprochement. It’s a long leap we have to overcome. His father is a construction worker. He’s a computer scientist who sidelines as a construction worker. I used to be in the computer business, after having been a truck driver in a lumber yard. No chance of any commonalities.

4. Grandsons think you’re deadmen. Don’t disabuse them of their presumption. Surprise them with your longevity.

It takes boy children a long long — did I mention long — time to recognize that men might have advice for men.

Annoying. We didn’t all run out on our families screwing every babe at the country club and every secretary in the office, but… Enough of us did. Which is screwing our sons too. And our daughters.

Grandfathers have to field every kind of ball bouncing out of the infield.

5. Grandfathers have to hold the line. Right is right, wrong is wrong, even if your granddaughter has a crush on her cousin. Even if they seem to be moving drugs around. Somebody has to be willing to levy judgment. (Not saying this is happening. Just being hypothetical. Another GF task.)

6. Grandfathers have to be willing to die for rules one through five. Sorry.

7. Don’t look like me.

If you need any clarification of the rules, I’m happy, or at least willing, to oblige.

I’m right, I’m right, I’m right, Goddammit.

So. Brizoni is finally ready.

I haven’t dismissed these arguments. I’ve dismantled them. [Yeah. I saw the movie. Shutter Island. Lots of dismantling there.]

I’ve been plugging away at yet another dismantling of everything you said in your last email, point-by-point. Marshalling evidence, refining arguments. Don’t want you to think I’ve ignored anything. Gonna be massive. Mozart, Michelangelo, Dante, Bacon and Magellan [uh, where is it, big boy, this massive evidence, any sign whatever that you know more about Mozart, Michelangelo, Dante, Bacon and Magellan than I do? SPOILER: Not here. He brings not only no massive evidence but no evidence whatsoever. He just attacks me.] But I keep getting hung up on this:

“I like to hear you say,

In my view, Ayn Rand has done this successfully.’ Yes, in your view she has. In my view, she hasn’t. Would John Galt have done anything to stop the Holocaust or the Killing Fields? It doesn’t actually come up in Atlas Shrugged, does it? Rather, there’s a sense of letting the dumb-ass victims be dumb-ass victims while us smart ones run away to the Colorado Hole in the Wall Butch and Sundance were aiming for.

What you have can’t be called a “view.” It’s a mostly uninformed opinion. [As opposed to your own uninformed opinion.] I know you think you Get It, no sweat, because that’s what Robert Laird does. Not this time. You read Atlas once in high school, didn’t understand it***, retained less of it as the years wore on, and now have a bad picture of her philosophy sketched from too few facts. Add those facts together and you maybe have half a clue, at most. [No facts whatever in Atlas Shrugged. It’s pure ideology.]

Since you don’t know what you’re talking about, you inevitably attack straw men. [Atlas is completely about straw men, not my response to it.] The theme of Atlas is, to cop the lexicon, the role of man’s mind in human life. Which it dramatizes by showing how quickly, and how totally, human life falls apart when the mind withdraws. [Hardly. The book is a cartoon, starring Dagny, the curious winner who keeps losing… and talking.] The book is demonstrative, not prescriptive. If Rand had thought Galt’s Gulch was the way to go in real life, she would have gone there. [uh, Dagny went there.] She could have built the place with her own money if it came to that — she died with a couple million bucks stuffed in a Savings and Loan across from her apartment. [I thought Ethan Frome was a good capitalist parable too, all that gold stuffed under his mattress.] It could have been many times that if she’d ever cared to make any investments whatever. She never did. [Everything under the mattress is the Russian way.] All she wanted was the freedom to write. The rest was gravy. She didn’t flee to a secret paradise and watch the world of fools burn. She thought the world was worth trying to save. Can you say the same? [Really, you callow clown? You dare ask that of me?]

I thought about linking to a debate that answers many of your entry-level objections. You should at least know what you’re rejecting before you reject it. [I’m well aware of everything I’m rejecting. I’m a fucking polymath and a genius. You’re a lowly rote-Randian with pretensions.]

I’m not sure I should bother. I worry you flat-out, full-stop, don’t care to think any further. That you’ve reached a comfortable stopping point. [Acute observation. Ask anyone. They’ll all swear I’m quitting hope tomorrow. Or the next day.] You’ve had your fill, thanks so much, and what kind of monster am I to force more down your gullet. Fact? Proof? No such thing as either, if you squint hard enough. Maybe the universe began ten seconds ago, with history intact. Yooooooooou can’t “”””prove”””” it didn’t, can you? Pigeon strut. And a sigh of relief that God is safe and sound behind the veil of unreasonable doubt. [What worm has eaten your brain? What have you ever proved? Name any one thing you’ve proved. Except your own idiocy? If I squint hard enough, I can see a fool blowing up his own life in a narcissist fantasy.]

Why you think the Byzantines had the right idea. [???!!!] Stagnation is fine as long as you’re content. Who needs Mozart when you’ve got your grandfather’s hymnal? Who needs Michelangeo when you’re surrounded by all these perfectly fine frescoes? Who needs Dante when you can just read Matthew 24 again? Who needs Bacon at all — never mind that medicine has had no new ideas for five hundred years. [???!!!] Who needs Magellan when everything’s awesome right here? [You’re insane. Utterly. I told you more about these people than you ever knew before.] Spend your days like a soft white belly, basking in the sun. What a lovely retirement for a worn-out old man. Peace without life. [You think what you’re doing is life? lol. When it comes to minds, you’re the soft white belly. The jelly of not quite knowing much topped by the deathly flesh of not believing in anything but the screeds of an ancient Brit homosexual.]

Hell with it. Here’s the link. You’ll skim it for an excuse to ignore it. If even that. Religious freedom means the the [sic] freedom to lie to yourself about whatever you want. Without so much as being called out on it. Facts be damned. [So keep on lying to yourself, dude. Don’t let me stop you. I’m just twice your age and twice your IQ. No prob.]

Go on. Prove me right yet again. [Yet again? You’ve never proven a single damned thing.] My expectations are as low as a casket.

In which it is proved once and for all that the once vaunted Brizoni is now an incoherent meth-head. When he comes to his senses, he can call me. But he’s not now in my league. Never will be. But not many are. Sorry. I’m in a mood. Not a mood for pretending.

That would be the notorious pigeon strut. Which I do every day. Notwithstanding being a worn-out old man.

***”Didn’t understand it.” Where does such arrogance come from? I understood it fine. Loved it. I was fourteen. Brizoni is now twice that age and more. He’s still mentally fourteen. Sorry, folks, I’m tired. Shouldn’t have reopened this can of worms. I apologize. He really is a moron. Past help.

P.S. I’m all done pretending now. Brizoni is a junkie. Anyone reading this who knows him get him some help. He would never have written or argued this poorly without being in serious trouble mentally. Mother? Wife? Anyone who follows his Internet exploits. Get him some help.

P.P.S. Just saw the ‘smoking gun’ of Brizoni’s rant. Should have detected it before. My error. Highlighting mine.

I’m not sure I should bother. I worry you flat-out, full-stop, don’t care to think any further. That you’ve reached a comfortable stopping point.

“Full-stop”is a Britishism, their affectation about avoiding the use of the simple grammatical element known as the “period.” Probably related to their aversion to all things female, which is so pervasive that they use the words “twat” and “cunt” exclusively as insults to men. They’re too afraid to use them on women, except under the most extreme circumstances.

At any rate, this usage by a boy from the Pacific Northwest is proof positive that he has been reading the tweets and other spontaneous Internet defecations of Richard Dawkins. But here’s the interesting thing. Being the butt slave of both Ayn Rand and Richard Dawkins has to be a rending experience. No chance that Dawkins would regard Rand as anything but a capitalist twat. No chance Rand would regard Dawkins as anything but a pansy Brit cunt.

Gotta be tough on poor Brizoni.

Rather than deal with the polar opposites in his own religion, he chooses the much easier alternative of attacking me and mine. Sad.

But also funny. Time to man up, rent boy.

Not Raebert. But exactly like him, It’s the deerhound way. Also the human way. Times we believe he doesn’t love. But he does. In his remote, mythic way. There’s the Tasmanian tiger yawn after what looks like coma. Then he kisses.

I took a video of Raebert’s magic eyes, which do not do red eye but blue eye. My wife posted it to Youtube with a deerhound tag, which despite the occasional wolfhound or Afghan intrusion, surfaced other deerhound videos. So I couldn’t resist one more post on the subject here. I was particularly taken by the one above.

His eccentricities continue, as if he’s inventing them to remain mysterious. His latest is pawing food out of his bowl and then overturning the bowl altogether. Not for me, but for the missus. He much prefers her Danishes and sticky buns, the last bit of her sandwiches, and every chip and sweet and hors d’oeuvre that emerges from the well stocked cupboard by her desk.

I think his all around insanity might be keeping us sane through some challenging times.

But I don’t want anyone to forget he’s not just a couch potato. He has all the physical capacity to do this too.

Not Rae, though I’ve seen him run… But this isn’t Deerhound Diary either.

It’s daunting to live with. Sometimes after an outing he comes bounding up the stairs at something like top speed. If he couldn’t stop on a dime, as he does, there would be broken bones.

Then he subsides. As I do after a strenuous post. 100 percent on and 100 percent off. Like a switch being thrown. I know the feeling. I guess the appropriate term is ‘extreme personality.’

Sorry for interrupting. Go on about your day.

Yeah. These are Christians crucified by ISIS. Didn’t know? Why?

This is highly irregular for me. I always try not to reproduce an entire column by another writer. I’m doing it this time because I think he wants to get the word out. Which is what I’m doing.

Ronald S. Lauder: Who will stand up for the Christians?

The following opinion article authored by World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder was first published in the ‘New York Times’ on 20 August 2014.

Why is the world silent while Christians are being slaughtered in the Middle East and Africa?

In Europe and in the United States, we have witnessed demonstrations over the tragic deaths of Palestinians who have been used as human shields by Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza. The United Nations has held inquiries and focuses its anger on Israel for defending itself against that same terrorist organization. But the barbarous slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Christians is met with relative indifference.

The Middle East and parts of central Africa are losing entire Christian communities that have lived in peace for centuries. The terrorist group Boko Haram has kidnapped and killed hundreds of Christians this year — ravaging the predominantly Christian town of Gwoza, in Borno State in northeastern Nigeria, two weeks ago. Half a million Christian Arabs have been driven out of Syria during the three-plus years of civil war there. Christians have been persecuted and killed in countries from Lebanon to Sudan.

Historians may look back at this period and wonder if people had lost their bearings. Few reporters have traveled to Iraq to bear witness to the Nazi-like wave of terror that is rolling across that country. The United Nations has been mostly mum. World leaders seem to be consumed with other matters in this strange summer of 2014. There are no flotillas traveling to Syria or Iraq. And the beautiful celebrities and aging rock stars — why doesn’t the slaughter of Christians seem to activate their social antennas?

President Obama should be commended for ordering airstrikes to save tens of thousands of Yazidis, who follow an ancient religion and have been stranded on a mountain in northern Iraq, besieged by Sunni Muslim militants. But sadly, airstrikes alone are not enough to stop this grotesque wave of terrorism.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is not a loose coalition of jihadist groups, but a real military force that has managed to take over much of Iraq with a successful business model that rivals its cold-blooded spearhead of death. It uses money from banks and gold shops it has captured, along with control of oil resources and old-fashioned extortion, to finance its killing machine, making it perhaps the wealthiest Islamist terrorist group in the world. But where it truly excels is in its carnage, rivaling the death orgies of the Middle Ages. It has ruthlessly targeted Shiites, Kurds and Christians.

“They actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick” a Chaldean-American businessman named Mark Arabo told CNN, describing a scene in a Mosul park. “More children are getting beheaded, mothers are getting raped and killed, and fathers are being hung.”

This week, 200,000 Aramaeans fled their ancestral homeland around Nineveh, having already escaped Mosul.

The general indifference to ISIS, with its mass executions of Christians and its deadly preoccupation with Israel, isn’t just wrong; it’s obscene.

In a speech before thousands of Christians in Budapest in June, I made a solemn promise that just as I will not be silent in the face of the growing threat of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the Middle East, I will not be indifferent to Christian suffering. Historically, it has almost always been the other way around: Jews have all too often been the persecuted minority. But Israel has been among the first countries to aid Christians in South Sudan. Christians can openly practice their religion in Israel, unlike in much of the Middle East.

This bond between Jews and Christians makes complete sense. We share much more than most religions. We read the same Bible, and share a moral and ethical core. Now, sadly, we share a kind of suffering: Christians are dying because of their beliefs, because they are defenseless and because the world is indifferent to their suffering.

Good people must join together and stop this revolting wave of violence. It’s not as if we are powerless. I write this as a citizen of the strongest military power on earth. I write this as a Jewish leader who cares about my Christian brothers and sisters.

The Jewish people understand all too well what can happen when the world is silent. This campaign of death must be stopped.

Finally a few of the traditionally lefty constituencies are starting to side with Israel against Hamas.

About 190 high-profile Hollywood players, including studio heads and actors, have reportedly signed a pro-Israel petition criticizing Hamas’ barbarism.

The statement began circulating about two weeks ago and includes signatures from Sylvester Stallone, Ivan Reitman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman. The entire list can be found here.

The list unites celebrities from both sides of the aisle, from hard-leftists like Aaron Sorkin and Bill Maher to conservatives such as Kelsey Grammer.

But who is speaking up for both Jews and Christians? You tell me.

No Comments required or wanted. Roundheads.

Not a great day in the IP household, at least initially. The missus had to swing for the fences with two out in the ninth of game seven of her career. But she poled the spitball she was thrown into the upper deck. As I hoped she would without being certain. Life, you know, is not always fair.

Tired me out waiting, I don’t mind telling you. Wanted to give this particular bit of frippery a pass. B-u-u-u-t, I couldn’t. Don’t ask me why. Something about the Brizoni exchange. Something about pomposity and media ambition disguised as virtue. Even something about the difference between morality and mere posturing. Yes, Brizoni, some vocal Christians are as empty as you think we all are.

Erick Erickson, whom I’ve written about before (And before that, too), is playing the Christian card, as if he owns the whole deck. He has a post today that I just can’t let go without comment. He begins by damning his own commenters.

Were I to recreate this site, I think it would have no comments section. Disqus is just horrible. I do not recommend it to anyone. And it just helps further what I see on so much social media these days. As much as the internet can bring people together of like mind, it also can help shrill minorities of people think their views are more mainstream than they are. That then emboldens them further.

Why? Because some conservatives violate his personal definition of Christianity. He specifies:

To start, Christian conservatives were roundly assailed by other conservatives for daring to provide aid and comfort to children whose parents had shipped them across the border. Some could not distinguish between giving a child a teddy bear and supporting Mexican drug cartels. It was all one or all the other. In fact, many Christians, myself included, want expedited deportations and a secure border. But we also want to make sure the children, some victims of human trafficking, were taken care of, fed, and comforted.

But to some on the right, that is aiding law breakers. The anger and hysteria directed at conservatives engaged in private charity had all the makings of a leftist police state making us care about how we choose to spend our own money.

The second was bringing Dr. Brantly and his co-worker back to the United States. The number of angry calls into my radio program from well meaning conservatives, comments across social media, opinion columns, agreement thereto, etc. really boggled my mind. Here are two Americans risking their lives to help others and we are supposed to turn our back on them, leave them there, or criticize their decision to go in the first place? That’s not the America I know or love. The level of outright anger, fear, and bitterness over the decision to take care of American citizens and the lack of knowledge and understanding that formed the foundation for the anger, fear, and bitterness really left me wondering what is going on.

The last is the present situation in Ferguson, MO. The rush to win a fight and lay blame instead of mourning a loss and praying for a situation just leaves me perplexed. The rush to “change the narrative” with bad facts to replace bad facts by some folks who keep the ichthys [sic] on their car unsettles me.

The paragraph that set up this listing of grievances is priceless.

In the past several months there have been three incidents that have solidified for me that my faith and my politics are starting to collide. While I am a firm believer in the idea of a conservative populism, I see a dangerous trend within the mix of unfortunate shrillness and hostility. That trend is playing out in the comments here at RedState and on social media.

Awww. All of his items of offense are presumptuous, misleading, or just plain rock headed.

To deal with his first outrage, I’ll quote someone else, a commenter at Hotair, who responded to Erickson’s claim that it’s unchristian to think teddy bears are not a solution.

Because we surmise that this “let’s help these kids” will eventually turn into saying we should grant them amnesty. We’ve been down the road before. It starts with a call to compassion for their current well being, then after we are softened up on that front, a call for amnesty of “just these kids” and then that expands, and expands again, until every illegal is amnestied. We are not as stupid as you think we are Erik.

And, we also realize that sometimes being nice does more harm in the long run. The more compassion we show to those who make it here illegally, the more that will likely come illegally.

I have not been at RedState for a long while – because Redstate was always more of a republican site than a conservative site – but in some of my last forays there – during the Bush push for amnesty – the writers there were all pro amnesty, and they were vicious in calling anyone against amnesty racist, etc. Moe Lane was particularly eager to call everyone who disagreed with him about amnesty a racist.

So, this argument by Erickson is disingenuous. It is an attempt to use “faith” to push his politics…

I’m not saying we should always be nasty, or always angry, or always take the low road. But, this argument that we must never be any of those things is absurd. And note, these people don’t pull this argument out when conservatives are mean or angry about other things – only when it is about something where they disagree – immigration.

I’ll handle the other two papal denunciations myself.

Erickson is also offended, like many, about Coulter’s takedown of the sainted Ebola doctor who was just released from hospital yesterday. Couple points. Coulter is always Coulter, more than half serious and more than half satirical. The extra is the mileage she gets from long blonde hair and very short skirts. She was making, despite the sarcasm, an interesting point.

Whatever good Dr. Kent Brantly did in Liberia has now been overwhelmed by the more than $2 million already paid by the Christian charities Samaritan’s Purse and SIM USA just to fly him and his nurse home in separate Gulfstream jets, specially equipped with medical tents, and to care for them at one of America’s premier hospitals.

Yesterday he thanked God for his salvation. Okay. But the god that saved him strikes me more as a classical “deus ex machina” than the savior of his faith. An American jet plane descended into Africa to save an American doctor and nurse and whisk them to safety back in the land of their origin, at great expense and with miraculous results. Where else have we heard of people recovering from Ebola?

Maybe that’s not what he intended. But we never had the headline, “Saintly doctor refuses to be jetted back to America for space age treatment of deadliest virus in the world.”

Not judging him. I’m sure he’s a good man. But Father Damien he ain’t. At least not yet. Talk to me in a few months when he does or doesn’t have a million dollar book contract. Until then he’s the luckiest, most privileged unselfish altruist on earth.

And, yeah, Erick is upset about the Jefferson fiasco too. Because Christians have no right to be ticked off about looting and lynch mentality as a substitute for the rule of law.

For his information, National Review has become the dullest literate publication in the nation during the last week, because despite countless articles by multiple outstanding opinion writers, the refrain has been numbingly the same: We don’t know what happened, we can’t judge facts we don’t have, and all we can do is encourage everyone to reserve judgment. And btw we hate looting and rushes to judgment. How unChristian can you get?

Erickson. Product of a new force in political culture. Naked ambition clothed in traditional virtue. No, he doesn’t hate America. He’s just willing to be a kind of new Cromwell, imposing his own righteousness on the rest of us in the name of what he presumes we were always supposed to believe in.

Sad thing is, I think Glenn Beck is way way ahead of him in this particular race.

Even farther ahead are most of the rest of us. Who regard them as transparently ambitious fools. A fairly pitiful minority. Even conservative progressivism has no legs. It’s just another dead, and frightfully deadening, end.

But I ‘ve been wrong before. God knows.

“It blowed up real good.”

Haven’t wanted to get into the Ferguson, Missouri, story. Nobody knows what happened yet. But that’s my point today.

It reminds me of the Tour de France. The time when the sprinters start positioning themselves for the finish. Who’s going to break first for the final run, who’s waiting to be ready to overtake, who’s just setting up his team leader?

Guess I’m talking about the Tour de Media. That’s all these things are.

Something happens. It’s kind of a flash mob thing. A single spark, a tweet, an event that lights up a preconceived narrative and makes it go viral. It doesn’t have to be important. It can be but that’s not necessary. It just has to have legs and lungs and loads of larcenous leeches attached.

The Trayvon Martin case was perfect. No facts. No evidence. No common sense. The Ferguson case is like Sharknado 2, the sequel we’ve all been waiting for. We want it so bad the actual facts don’t matter. We just love the plot and the chance to indulge our favorite emotions — blaming others for things we know nothing of — until we get to feel incredibly superior about our position, regardless of whether it’s left or right.

I used the term bomb. That’s all it is. Everybody involved, anyone near the epicenter, gets hurt, often fatally. It’s the rest of us who derive the entertainment from the spectacle.

My own favorite culture bomb was the Duke Lacrosse scandal. Hey, we got to destroy the lives of four spoiled rich kids. Cool. (Always hated Duke.) The spark is struck, the tweets fly, and suddenly there’s a humongous explosion of newsprint, TV pundits, and sanctimonious opportunists frigging us to self righteous orgasms. Woweeee!!! That’s right. We’re the explosion. We’re the bomb.

This time, the victims include multiple media types. MSNBC had rocks thrown at them. Rush Limbaugh got ahead of the story, which he very rarely does, and had to retreat, grudgingly, to neutrality. This is what happens with culture bombs. The only safe place is well away from the action and the script. Why you don’t see me pontificating just now, as I could, about militarized police or black on black crime. That’s like flinging hand grenades into a nuclear reactor. For now I’m just a spectator.

But we spectators are always okay. Whatever happens is what we take credit for. I knew he was guilty. I knew he was innocent. I always had the situation nailed. Nobody can fool me.

In the meantime, you’ve been suckered one more time by the magician’s misdirection. One dead guy in Ferguson. 42 shootings last week in Chicago. How many hundreds, thousands, dead in the Middle East? In Ukraine?

The whole purpose of a culture bomb. Keep people fired up, blown up, about zilch.

Less prosaically, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Feeling better now, are we?

I don’t know what art is anymore. Especially when it comes to women. There’s a performance artist who simulates birth with paint, in public, creating paintings by “delivering” the colors onto canvas from eggs stuffed inside her vagina. (Don’t look.)

Then there’s this woman, who is far less grotesque but still baffling. She’s a photographer. Every year, on her birthday I presume, she arranges for a self portrait, always bare breasted, sometimes with members of her family, sometimes alone. Like this:

Nice but for the, you know, giant panties.

Thing is, she keeps at it. All the way into her sixties. It’s clear she’s not modest. Like, there’s this one:

Which is, if not actively weird, not modest either. Is that her dad? Don’t tell me.

There’s not much in the way of explanation. She just does it year after year. And I have to admit I’m wondering, not about the exhibitionism per se, which I can understand, but why 40 years of mommy panties?

Bikinis, okay. Thong, better. Nothing, best. Dare I say more artistic? Unless you prefer l’orteil du dromedaire.

It’s not exactly as if she’s all about coverup.

Very little left to the imagination, actually.

Is that the art? It’s not finally about her at all but about mommy panties? Do they mean something? Symbolize something? Tell us something we desperately need to know?

I give up. Help me see what’s going on here. If you can. She’s 67 now.

Liking her persistence is not the same thing as understanding it.

Oh well. Life is deeply mysterious. But not as mysterious as women. People who think they know all the secrets of the universe should bear this in mind. Women are always out of this world.

The hardliners keep wanting proof. They think science applies. It doesn’t. Here is the proof of that. Whatever you do, don’t look at it.

I TOLD you not to look at it. The way people are. Men can’t wait to look at it and, having been warned, couldn’t possibly be deterred. The women, having been warned and told not to look, have to look BECAUSE they’ve been told not to look. And then they’re both disgusted and outraged. On this dichotomy hangs all the friction between the sexes. They see the same things, for different reasons, and have exactly opposite reactions.

Why we keep going round and round in our beautiful dance together. Only God knows how and why we still manage to snuggle. But we do, don’t we? Now, if we could just solve the mommy panty problem, all would be right with the world. Is that the challenge being posed by a lifetime of strange photographs? Lose the damn panties?

Sigh. Hell if I know.

But I guess there’s always hope. A millennial put it to me succinctly the other day. “I believe in God because BREASTS.” Hard to refute. I feel much the same way, although my logic is different… because VAGINAS. Either way, something in red is a good idea.

Sometimes life is simpler than it seems.

Memory is a tricky thing. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Other times it doesn’t work.

Geez. It was 15 years ago that I wrote an autobiography of a future president before I’d even heard of our current president. It was in Shuteye Town 1999. And I’m pretty sure mine was funnier than his, though equally factual.

Me Slave

Chapter 1

I was always too proud, Mama said. It was probably a veracious assertion, but what else can you do in a hood where you’re owned by the Man. Before they sold off my father, he said to me, “Kareem—“ (He named me Kareem Abdul, but Abdul wasn’t our last name. We didn’t have last names then, back in the days before there was even a Martinlutherking, if we had even known there would be such a mentor, which we didn’t, because we weren’t allowed to go to school or take correspondence courses in Black Studies, or anything. It was for shit in 1856. But to resume our tale…) “Kareem,” quoth my father, “you’ve got to be proud. Don’t let any man dis your name, your female companion, or your wheels. That is the name of that melody.”

Ah, how young I was, how less than fully mature, mayhap even callow. For it seemed to me ironic indeed that my beloved pater would specify his wheels as a particular object of pride. I myself found them humiliating, an unending catalyst for blushes and lamentably thin excuses. What Afrian-Amerian lad past puberty could tolerate being observed in the rumble seat of an 1842 Buick? Worse, the tape player was an eight-track, and the only cartridge my father possessed was an anthology of Henry Mancini, in whose lush overuse of the violins I was certain I could hear the dark white heart of oppression.

It would not be until years—nay, decades—later that I would recall the ephemeral bliss of sharing with my father, in that ludicrous wreck of a vehicle, the liberating AM voice of our only real heroes, the stars of the suppressed and poverty-stricken Negro Leagues. Such is the miracle of radio, though. For us it was impossible to hear the worn seams of Satchel Paige’s glove, the holes in Josh Gibson’s Nike’s. It sounded altogether as wonderful and rich—yes, rich—as the broadcasts of the fabled New York Dodgers, who in those days were white as a bleached bone, with nary a thought of choosing Jackie Robinson in the college draft, or Reggie Jackson, or Hank “The Hammer” Aaron—whose names we, of course, had never heard in the cotton fields of Virginia, and wouldn’t in our lifetimes. Thus was the wretchedness of an existence without more than a handful of positive role models. It made one feel as if there was no chance to attain stardom, to find the so-called good life out in the western paradise of Californica, where only white people were allowed to find gold and buy property in Beverly Hills. I had dreams, but they had to be kept small to avoid disappointment, or so I used to suppose.

Suppose, suppose. I have done a lot of that over the years. Suppose my Uncle Darrell hadn’t contracted AIDS, or cholera as we called it then. He was the only family my Mama had, and how she cried when he confessed that he had shared the rusty nail he used for a hypodermic with Michael, the young ne’er-do-well who lived in the next hut. “But he’s gay,” she wailed, her whole real-sized frame shaking with sobs. “You’ll catch the cholera from that N-word person!”

Yes, she was colorful in her language, at times outrageous. If I flinched at her use of the N-word, however, it couldn’t have been much more than a precocious foreboding of days I would never live to see. For in our piteous little hood, the N-word was ubiquitous, if not peripatetic. It was “N-word” this and “N-word” that, so that an outsider might have been pardoned for believing that we Afrian-Amerians had no given names, only this one all-encompassing descriptor to which we answered like so many dogs.

And so, it seems, we have completed a circle, returning once again to the matter of pride. My pride. Which was continually offended by everyone and everything. Until the day I determined upon an answer of sorts. An answer that seemed to me perfect, complete, and incontestably inevitable. Escape.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Green and merciless.

Here’s the condescending precursor to today’s game, as published by Youtube.

Here’s the condescending CBS treatment of the first round LLWS game today against Tennessee.

Not about race or sex. It was, for most of us, about Philly sports teams.

We watched, enthralled and engaged. Philadelphia has never had a team in the Little League World Series. Generations of political incompetence and corruption have thrown out all the parochial schools, all the possibilities of middle class participation such as the LLWS represents. But a visionary coach fought his way in, and we are cheering them all on. Yes, Mo’ne (pronounced like the artist Monet) is a gifted pitcher, but she’s also backed up by the kind of team Philadelphians recognize as their own. Daring and gifted fielders, bad ball hitters at the plate, risk takers, loyalists to one another, and endowed with that grim determination to prevail over the usual anti-Philly propaganda.

Philly won.

Watching them today was an emotional throwback to the batting antics of Mike Schmidt, who habitually went 0 and 2 on the first two pitches. Then he just stayed alive, fouling off the strikes and waiting for the balls. He led the league in walks as a rule. Schmidt, being the best third baseman in history, also often ended his at bats with a home run. But the Taney team accomplished something just as important as a homer when you have an ace competing with an ace. They fouled and fouled and fouled a power pitcher until he finally ran out of pitch count and had to be benched. Little League relievers are at a disadvantage. They’re not closers. They’ve been playing the game in other positions. They have control problems when they’re suddenly called to the mound.

Philadelphia did what Philadelphia does. Stick with what’s working. Mo’ne did not strike out as many as the Tennessee ace, whom you could almost see ten years from now on an MLB pitching mound. But she finished the game. She didn’t need as many pitches to finish her innings. Sometimes she needed only eight pitches to get three outs. And she was her own closer. She struck out the last four batters she faced.

Through the course of the game she never changed expression. When she needed a big play her teammates provided it. They love her. City of Brotherly Love.

Even the Tennessee ace acknowledged her with a fist bump after her last at bat and his last inning. America is not about race and sex. (Although I’m thinking a bunch of power hitters from Tennessee are scratching their heads tonight…)

City of Brotherly Love. Not about separation, demographics, divisive narratives. Watch the kids. A team is a team because it suppresses all those things in the name of working together.

But gunfighter eyes don’t hurt.

Happy conservative Mary Katharine Ham.

This stuck in my craw the other day. Hotair’s MKH thought fit to lecture the rest of us about how we should feel regarding the progressive opposition.

Many of you will likely disagree with Andrew WK and my lauding of his philosophy, but I loathe the idea of a world where my every relationship and every decision is governed by adherence to my political ideology. I want to be friends with people of all stripes and see whatever movie and eat whatever pasta I feel like without running each of them through a political rubric. Not everything that is not of my political sensibility must deeply offend my sensibilities. One of the reasons I’m conservative is because if you increase without end the number of areas in which the federal government meddles from afar, the more politics infects every corner of our lives. And, frankly, that’s a drab life. I recognize the irony that I somewhat inadvertently made politics my life in an attempt to rid our lives of them as much as possible. But, these days, I figure it’s my public service and the service of my fellow political junkies to pay attention to this all the time so others may be spared.

I object. The left is assaulting every traditional value in the United States. The republic and its constitution are being actively targeted for replacement by a voracious totalitarian state. Every single aspect of life, from the names of sports teams to the casting of TV sitcoms to the content of church sermons and the freedom of expression of people who oppose the administration, is being assaulted by federal agencies ranging from the DOJ to the IRS and EPA. All of which have, suddenly, their own SWAT teams.

Sorry, Mary. [Smile]. Hate to break it to you. I don’t want to be friends with anyone who endorses or apologizes for these developments. Because I know there’s something seriously wrong with them. They are stupid, sick, or evil. [Smile].

I’ll give you just three citations, though I could go on forever. The first has to do with the stupid ones.

Remember that liberals are the ones who are always claiming to have superior powers of empathy and tolerance — and a more sophisticated sense of science, which has shown us that conservatives are actually the ones who are better at seeing things from the other guy’s point of view. An experiment by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (sometimes called “an ideological Turing test”) asked liberals and conservatives to put themselves in the other guy’s socks for the duration of a test and ask them: How would your ideological opponent answer?

Conservatives were far better than liberals at this game, though that should have been easy to guess. When a conservative goes to the movies, picks up nearly any newspaper or watches TV news on any channel but one, he gets the liberal point of view. Liberals, especially in a place like New York, can easily seal themselves off from principled conservative thinking and many choose to do so. A result is that they haven’t a clue how conservatives think.

Liberals also kid themselves that they’re better at arguing than conservatives, but calling your opponent crazy is an appeal to emotion, not reason. It’s also a lazy schoolyard taunt, and it fails an elementary rule of debate, the prohibition of ad hominem remarks.

Stupid? Of course. Then there’s sick. Which is the land of impossible contradictions.

…how can liberals have such hate for this tiny, wonderful democracy of Israel. They’re supposed to be liberals — they have women’s rights, they have gay rights, they have freedom of the press, freedom of speech — and they hate this nation like no other nation on earth.

And they look at the Palestinians, and the Islamists, and the Arabs in general — not the Arabs in general, mostly the Islamists — and they see them as the victims. How can it be? How can they report… why do they do this? It’s because if you start out saying that the Arabs and the Israelis are equally good cultures, if you start out saying, as they must, these reporters must start out with the notion, that the Jews and the Palestinians both want peace. After all, the Palestinians would be a bad culture if they didn’t want peace. So, they’re not allowed to think that. That just might be their prejudices.

So they must start with the conclusion that both sides want peace. Then why are the Palestinians doing such horrible things? Why are they blowing up buses in Israel? It has to be… it can’t be their culture… so it has to be something the Jews did to provoke them. Now they will look through and cherry pick, and spin, and manipulate, oh wait, didn’t a Jew build a house in Jerusalem three weeks ago? Oh, that must be… and that becomes the salient part of the story.

And the more heinous the attack, the more evil the provocation must have been. Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. That’s what the liberal believes. That if you eliminate discriminating thought, you’ll eliminate things to disagree about. We won’t fight, we won’t kill each other, we won’t scream and yell, we won’t hurt each other. If you eliminate thinking, they’re going to have this Paradise, this Kindergarden of Eden.

Adults who think, like Barack Obama and Ron Paul (et fils) that if we don’t hurt their feelings, they won’t want to kill us. Ramses the Second knew better than that four millennia ago. Sickness.

And then there’s evil. Who connives at the misrepresentation of reality for the purpose of enhancing their own power, prestige, and privilege? People who don’t care about anything but their place in the pantheon of plutocrats. The press has become evil.

On March 24, 2008, another kind of scandal struck. All three broadcast networks covered the news that Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Somehow in the who-what-where reportage there wasn’t room for any of them to insert the word “Democrat.” On August 7, Hizzoner was sent to jail for violating the terms of his bond. More national coverage. Still no party affiliation from either ABC or NBC.

Republicans don’t fare as easily with the news of their felony charges. Four months after Mayor Kilpatrick was indicted, so too was Alaska senator Ted Stevens, allegedly for failing to report gifts. All three broadcast networks covered the story. Amazingly, they used identical language to describe him as “the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate.” Three months later (October 27, 2008), during the waning days of the election campaign, Stevens was convicted. Every network covered the story, and every network labeled him a Republican.

Compare that to Rod Blagojevich, the bizarre, loud-mouthed and foul-mouthed former governor of Illinois. He relished the klieg lights and seemingly was everywhere (until he landed at a more permanent address: prison). “Blago” was removed as governor on January 29, 2009, after being arrested and charged with corruption. ABC, CBS, and NBC gave major consideration to the story yet somehow managed not to inform their viewers that he was a Democrat. Blagojevich was convicted in June of 2011, and it happened again: major coverage by ABC, CBS, and NBC, with absolutely no Democratic label in sight.

So too former U.S. representative William Jefferson of Louisiana. On August 5, 2009, he was found guilty on charges of bribery, racketeering, and wire fraud. ABC and NBC covered the story on their evening newscasts, but only ABC labeled him a Democrat. CBS Evening News ignored the story altogether. The following morning all three filed stories. ABC and CBS ignored his party affiliation.

We’ve gone past the point of jovial political disagreements. Mary Katharine Ham, bless her heart, is having a career in the media. She may wish not to see that she’s swimming in evil. But she is. And it will take her down as it is taking all of us down. No Pollyanna feelgood psychobabble is going to change that.

Our country is under assault. I will not shake hands with or speak nicely to anyone who identifies himself with this stupid, sick, AND evil location in the political landscape. [Smile].

Oh goody. I’m Mary Katharine. I’m a conservative and I play nice. [Smile] [grrrr]

Smile, baby, smile. Silivren penna miriel. (Trans: Me the silver dagger.)

Already mentioned below my outrage that RealClearPolitics would publish, let alone solicit, such drivel. Before we get started, here’s who the guy is.

He attended Harvard University, where he was on the staff of The Harvard Crimson, and graduated with honors in 1976. He has been a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and has served on the Visiting Committee of the University of Chicago Law School.

Think he’s been a frequent guest on NPR too. Standard Obama Orc. Why would anyone care what he has to say? Only me. Because I can’t let it stand without subjecting it to a flamethrower. Here’s his spine numbing apologia for the worst president in U.S. History. I’m the one in Italics.

*******************

Is Obama To Blame for the World’s Crises?

The world is a hot mess. I always borrow my best lines from TMZ. Pro-Russian separatists shot down a passenger jet over Ukraine. Iraq is under siege from Islamic radicals, the Taliban is rebounding in Afghanistan and civil war grinds on in Syria. True.

Israel is fighting in Gaza. Negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program have come up empty. China is bullying its neighbors. Also true.

When trouble flares up around the world, U.S. presidents get blamed. No shit, Sherlock. We’ve been holding it all together for a hundred years. Funny what happens when dad leaves home and the office for a Vegas hooker. The latest polls show that only about 36 percent of Americans approve of Barack Obama’s handling of foreign affairs — down from 51 percent in May, 2011, after the death of Osama bin Laden. Yeah. Odd, ain’t it. You’ve got that old snapshot of Dad looking intent in his Santa suit by the Xmas tree, but when you finally learn what he was intent on was a stripper dancing by the fireplace, your perspective changes. Especially since you’ve learned by hard experience he’s never been near the Xmas tree since. Not even on the day the tree fell down and killed some of his employees. While he was in Vegas.

Republicans have not been reluctant to place responsibility on him. “Obama has presided over a recent string of disasters that make even (Jimmy) Carter look competent,” wrote Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush. “The world is on fire — and Obama’s foreign policy legacy is in tatters.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina charged that “his policies are failing across the globe.” All right. Granted that his critics are Republicans and must therefore be wrong, I’m sure we can find a counter-argument. Let’s see. A policy of universal apology to every dictator for everything they’ve done to abuse their people, coupled with a total shutdown of U.S. Operations in Iraq and an announced withdrawal date in Afghanistan, couldn’t have done anything to embolden our enemies and cause them to ignore weak American statements that are never backed up by anything but cheers from Leonardo Di Caprio.

The indictment implies that had the administration been tougher or smarter, Ukraine would be intact, Syria’s dictator would be gone, Iraq would be stable, Hamas would surrender, China would be a gentle lamb and Iran would give up its nukes. No. It implies that the usual behaviors of dictators and tyrants would have been less vicious, reckless, and costly. America has been a century long cop, not a miracle healer. But when the cop puts his gun on the ball washer at the first tee, people get the wrong idea. Assads kill 100,000 rather than 1,000. And Putins grab the whole Crimea and half of Ukraine, not just rivals off the street with Glock-bearing thugs. Also, just maybe, they don’t feel blasé about murdering 300 civilians who were just passing through. What else? With a status of forces agreement forcefully negotiated, Iraq might not be falling apart and crucifying and exterminating Christians, and Iran might not be jeering as they ramp up their nuke program confident of no penalty now or ever. Do matters of degree mean ANYTHING to you, Steven?

Conservatives say Obama thinks he’s king. But they seem to confuse him with God. We don’t think that. Trust me. Only he’s confused that way.

It’s easy to forget that planet Earth has always been a turbulent locale. Really? During the Reagan administration, often fondly recalled as a golden age, there was endless strife hither and yon: civil wars in Central America; Americans taken hostage in Lebanon; a U.S. military barracks blown up in Beirut; and Libyan terrorists bombing a Pan Am plane. Bad things happened back then? Not only hither? But yon too? Shucks, I just plain forgot, Steve. The world always behaves when you’ve got a Repub to tell’em to sit in the corner till they’re ready to straighten up. Of course, a massive and growing navy, Air Force, army, and ballistic missile network working on SDI don’t hurt none when it comes to standing up at the TelePrompTer and saying how very disappointed we crackers be with what youse did yestiddy. Do it?

The Soviets shot down a South Korean passenger jet. South Africa’s minority white government tried to suppress a black revolt. Did the Soviets shoot down a jetliner? Damn. I’ll bet Reagan said it was a sad accident and probably nobody’s fault before he adjourned to one of Nancy’s fancy state dinners. And revolt in South Africa? We all know how much Reagan hated black people. Pullease.

Reagan may get credit for causing the collapse of the Soviet Union, but tranquility didn’t follow. Of course tranquility was the whole point. Reagan was a total failure at that. He settled for getting the quivering fingers of totalitarian nonagenarians off the buttons of the thousands of ICBMs aimed at every American city, town, and hamlet. What an oaf. (Or half an oaf, which is better than none.) It wasn’t long before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Yugoslavia erupted into bloody ethnic conflict, civil war broke out in one African country after another, famine ravaged Somalia, Palestinians rose up against Israeli rule, and Pakistan and India fought a war after acquiring nuclear weapons. Because none of these situations was brewing, stewing, and simmering before Ronnie politely asked Gorby to please “Repaint this Wall, in appropriate Russian colors.”

And the 21st century? It did not turn the world into a serene oasis where America consistently got its way. Awwwwww. It didn’t? Good intentions don’t always lead to perfect results? Why the best parents never try to restrain their children in any way. The 9/11 attacks, the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan are still fresh in our minds. The Russian invasion of Georgia, al-Qaida’s migration into Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, Israel’s war in Lebanon, the civil war in Sudan — those are easy to forget. They are? You’re even better at forgetting than us Reagan sots are. Like, who can forget the time when Georgian rebels brought down that American Airlines 747 with one of the Kardashians on it? Oh. Sorry. Senior moment here. Which probably accounts for why I don’t remember the Al Qaida migration either. I thought the Sun King had Al Qaida pretty much neutralized, wiped out, and waiting submissively at the 19th green. My mistake.

North Korea cheated on a nuclear deal under Bush. Iran took major strides in its own nuclear quest. Thank God they’ve stopped THAT shit. Vladimir Putin gutted Russian democracy. China tried to intimidate its neighbors.

When was this era of harmony that Obama has somehow forfeited? It never happened. And it’s not likely to emerge under his successor. Even at the height of our post-Cold War power and influence, nasty events happened all the time, and we couldn’t stop them…

Yet the belief persists that the difference between a bad outcome and a good outcome is a willingness by the U.S. government to exercise leadership or show toughness or otherwise get involved. Like the way it didn’t matter what we did in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or the Cold War. In practice, our interventions often exact a terribly high price for a dismal result. Like three victories, one tie, and a loss, which if I read it right is enough to win a World Cup in futbol. If there are two ways to get a dismal result, maybe we should choose the one that doesn’t cost us thousands of lives or billions of dollars. And giving up more easily is always a good thing too. 440,000 lives in WWII, 60,000 apiece in Korea and Vietnam, and far less than that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost like a cop who’s been getting better at walking his beat, right before he retires and turns it over to the ascendant gangs.

We like to think we can easily shape the world to suit our preferences. But as the 19th-century historian Henry Adams pointed out, chaos is the law of nature, and order is the dream of man. I’m sure you like to think a lot of things, but it would be a huge help if you learned how to think in the first place.

***********

Sorry if I’ve been impolite. But I’ve no more use in my life for Harvard Crimson slop.

RCP, I’m about done with you too.

Sell out pretending to be objective in your presentation, and I’m done.

It’s an Instapunk Rule.

All the nicely dressed ladies and gentlemen holding their noses are the “Good Germans” who lived in the environs of Buchenwald and professed to know nothing of what was going on. What’s that smell? It’s the smell of you twisting your brains inside out to hate what is good and love what is evil. A stink you’ll never outgrow. Patton ordered it at Buchenwald. They came in laughing. Not how they left. But he’s dead now. Don’t feel too relieved. You may think you know something about contempt. I assure you you don’t.

I had three posts I was going to do today: one good, one bad, one ugly. The good is done. This is the bad. What U.S. troops who liberated Buchenwald and Dachau found was so bad that military discipline broke down. It was hushed up, but here are the accounts.

The footage above was taken by army troops. Photoshop didn’t exist. No makeup artists had the tools or the imagination to invent such entanglements of massed starved dead bodies in 1945. Yet Youtube still has plenty of disk space for holocaust deniers. Who are legion. Including this gem from a German bishop. Take a good long look at him. This is who you are becoming.

“Quote unquote the holocaust.” And pay attention to his locution about anti-semitism and truth. Is he saying what you thought he said? Play it again. Yes. And if you like this kind of stuff, Youtube has an ocean of it, all in the same superior tone you libs are used to using on Republicans. Enjoy.

I don’t have time for more of this. I have to get on to my ugly post, which is a fisk of an absolute fool harbored by RealClearPolitics of all places. Why it’s going to be so ugly.

Also why I’m tendering my apologies in advance to Abraham H. Miller at National Review for reprinting his column in its entirety. I think Dr. Miller will forgive me. Pass it on to your friends with full credit to the original author.

Progressive Jews, Wake Up

At pro-Hamas demonstrations in U.S cities in recent weeks, anti-Semitism rises up and is heard.

By Abraham H. Miller

In the largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Chicago’s Petersen Park, residents last Saturday morning found anti-Semitic leaflets on their way to synagogue to observe the Sabbath. The leaflets threatened violence against the community unless Israel stopped the war with Gaza.

For those progressive Jews who have found solace in the myth that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, the events across the globe of the last few weeks have been a rude and discomforting awakening. And so they turned to their final recourse, the belief that America was different.

Sure, there was a pogrom at a synagogue in Paris, but, well, that’s Paris. Muslims and their neo-fascist and leftist allies might walk through the streets of Germany shouting anti-Jewish slogans reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, but, well, that’s Germany.

Then came the pro-Hamas demonstrations in Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.

In San Francisco, if not for the police, some 30 pro-Israel protesters would have been brutalized by over 300 people demonstrating on behalf of the genocidal Hamas terrorists.

Sounds of a vicious, leftist anti-Semitism associated with anti-Zionism have long been audible in American society, but Jewish-community leaders, cut from leftist cloth, refused to acknowledge them. I have to wonder if those Jews pushed back on the streets of San Francisco by frenzied haters recognized some of their opponents from joint ventures on gun control, gay and lesbian rights, reproductive rights, and interfaith dialogues.

Those who believe in women’s rights, gay rights, reproductive rights, and human rights have cast their lot with people whose culture violates the basic dignities of freedom. What explains that? Hatred!

Hatred is the great unifier. If you are going to hate anyone, hate Jews, because no one cares. When a naïve foreign-born student at the University of California, San Diego, put up a noose in the library, as a prank on her boyfriend, the administration called for a campus soul searching and held meetings, vigils, and teach-ins. Moved by the inadvertent crisis she caused, the student confessed. The administration, however, was unsatisfied and notified the FBI, calling for her to be charged with a hate crime, all for an act of naï​veté.

But just months later, on the same campus, Jumanah Imad Albahri, a member of the Muslim Student Association, publicly proclaimed her support for killing Jews. The UCSD administration took no action.

Slight the voluble sensitivities of any group on an American campus and you’ll be condemned to sensitivity training and endless bureaucratic harassment. But propose to kill the Jews and you’ll find that the Constitution will be wrapped around you tighter than a piece of cling wrap.

The palpable anti-Semitism visible in recent demonstrations here in the United States has caused some of our progressive community leaders to come out strongly for Israel, but in so doing, they have to showcase their progressive credentials, as if it is necessary to say, take me seriously because I too am a progressive and I support Israel.

Forgive me if I am not awed by progressive credentials, especially knowing that these are the people who helped put this administration in office. Why did the Federal Aviation Administration cancel flights to Tel Aviv, when flights to Ukraine, where a passenger plane actually was downed, continue? Flights to Damascus and Baghdad, active war zones, were never canceled. Why was the Jew-hating, Islamist Turkish president Recep Erdogan once one of President Barack Obama’s most trusted allies in the Middle East? The questions answer themselves.

As for progressivism, gay marriage is not worth putting the lives of 6 million Jews in the hands of an incompetent, indifferent president, whose cultural affinity is with Islam. His Jewish associations in Chicago’s Hyde Park were with rabbis who believed peace was more likely if Israel was on the receiving end of condemnation.

Progressive Democrats do not support Israel in this existential struggle, but the Republicans do. The reality is that progressive Jews are going to have to decide whether they are progressives or Jews, because the term “progressive Jew” is increasingly becoming an oxymoron.

The modern anti-Semitism that now concerns our progressive leaders is an outgrowth of the Left. It was Marx who wrote the vile “On the Jewish Question.” Hitler recruited from elements at the margins of Germany’s economy. There is a reason he called his movement National Socialism and infused it with an ideology of workers’ rights. The distinguished political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset has shown how Hitler’s electoral surge came from the liberal elements of Germany.

Progressive rabbis will probably organize a call for peace, but that is precisely what Israel does not need. Israel needs to destroy the Hamas tunnels, some of which are under Israeli schools and residences. They form part of the command-and-control apparatus of the terrorists. No nation-state can live with rockets and missiles falling from the skies and explosive-laden tunnels underneath its schools.

As for our progressive Jewish communal leaders, I will believe their commitment to Israel when they go to the next interfaith-council meeting and publicly confront their fellow progressives about their boycott-divestment-sanctions hypocrisy. I will have renewed faith in our community-defense groups when they confront the double standards on campus that protect every group but Jews-

In the meantime, their failure to do so only means that, increasingly, American Jews will have to start behaving and thinking like French Jews, because the bigotry of Islam and its leftist allies does not end at Europe’s coast.

— Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. He has served on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Miller is a Jew. I am not. Why I feel free to add my own postscript to all the non-Jewish Americans who are pure sons and daughters of Josef Goebbels. You liberals, progressives, Paulistas, whatever you want to call yourselves, who cannot see the simple truth that Israel is fighting for its life against barbarian fanatics who possess no morality worthy of the name (yeah cut off my daughter’s clitoris and stone her if she gets raped) and almost no consciousness, do not deserve to live yourselves. Look yourself in the mirror with one thought. When was it in your pitifully perverted education that women’s liberation came to consist of the infinite right to abortions for American women and nothing else? Not even makeup, a driver’s license, a degree in Women’s Studies, or an orgasm for anyone else. (Overlooking altogether the right to live through rape or mere imprudent copulation at a frat party.) When? Are you proud of that moment? Could you blog about it for the rest of us?

I sure hope so. Articulating it would be good for you. Because it might be the last thing you try to explain in dead earnest before you are put to the sword by the savages you presently support. Actually, the smart course would be to deny, deny, deny. Call it your Peter moment. I kind of like that.

And as to you who have publicly chanted or even thought “Back to Birkenau,” I wish you a traumatic last moment of life.

Now I have to go foul myself with the writings of a former Harvard Crimson editor named Steven Chapman. Just when I thought Garrett Epps had laughingstocked himself out of the journalistic universe with his fellatial adoration of you know who. No rest for the guys who were actually smart at Harvard way back when.

What I watched last night till thunderstorms knocked out the electric. The Papuans have no need for electric and no concept of romantic love. Cool, eh?

This is a post that could be huge or succinct. I prefer succinct. Sometimes things that don’t belong together in any rational way belong together just because they do. So I’ve assembled some things that belong or don’t with one another. My hope is that they will serve as compound fractures of the bone most people use for a mind.

You see. There is no link.

All any of us get is a moment.

It can be the same moment over and over and over or an instant that lasts forever. Or both.

Maybe why the concept of divinity is embedded in all of us, to be accepted or fought tooth and nail, byte by byte.

Because everything dies or goes away in the end, all brief as flies but the stone stuff…

…and in all the millennia no one has ever been free. Just ask us.

Unless someone or something has been surreptitiously raising the bar of what it means to be human. Or maybe it always was, is, and shall be mere self adornment. Whatever that consists of.

NOTE. Perurambo, Air Disasters, Afternoon of a Faun, and Men at Lunch are available in full at Netflix. In a later post I’ll tell you what all I learned is NOT available at Netflix. It’s an eye opener.

We can do this. We can learn new stuff that changes us.

We keep hearing that our magically brilliant scientists have figured out everything important or are on the verge of same, in every specialty from climate change to cosmology. This past week has been a bit of a deflater for such bombast. I won’t provide you links unless I relent later, but the Climate Apocalyptics have an inconvenient problem with soaring penguin populations in the Antarctic. They’re supposed to be declining and endangered. Instead they’re thriving. And the cosmologists, who already are muttering to themselves about their inability to find the dark matter that makes up 75 percent of the universe, are now reporting that the universe seems to be missing 75 percent of the light that should be here. Dadgummit.

I don’t hold it against them that science is a moving target. I only hold it against them when they overplay their presumptuous, unproven speculations. But I’ve been doing that for a long long time. Here’s a column from Shuteye Nation coming up on 15 years old.

April 17, 2000

The Television Connoisseur

The most eminent media critic of the Shuteye Times.

“Dozing with Dinosaurs” was magnificent educational television.

Those of you who watch for my column know that it is a rara avis. I write only when I am moved by quality of the sort infrequently aspired to by television producers. Thus, it has been some months since I put pen to paper for the Times. The last time I felt tempted, indeed, was in March, when the Evolution Channel mounted its two-hour special called “Excising the Mammoth.” On that occasion, I was profoundly impressed by the overall integrity of the production. Lesser lights might have pandered to the audience by insisting that the attending scientists remove the ice and reveal the actual carcass of the animal. Instead, we were privileged to receive a television treat—two hours of closeup footage of heavily accented Siburians chipping away at an iceberg and the formless shadow it contained.

In the final analysis I demurred, however, because in the closing moments of the special a certain amount of ‘show biz’ did regrettably intrude. I found the reattachment of the amputated tusks mawkish and sentimental. Too, I was repelled by the artifices employed to imbue the transportation of the icebound mammal with suspense—the melodramatic music, the jump cuts intended to suggest that the helicopter might not be able to carry the load, et cetera. Taken together, the lapses culminated in failure to meet my standards.

In a word, I am a stern critic. That is why I am so pleased to be able to tender a fully glowing review of the Evolution Channel’s most recent effort, an epic film bearing the title “Dozing with Dinosaurs.” From first to last, it was magnificent.

I had not anticipated the broadcast with much enthusiasm. Promotional pieces promised an application of high technology to the project which inevitably suggested Hollywood-style exploitation of the topic with computer graphics and other sensational special effects. I was expecting ersatz drama, stage-managed excitement, a determined effort to provoke and retain my interest.

Happily I now confess that I was wrong. “Dozing with Dinosaurs” dared to be true to its subject. For three hours that could have been three years, we saw the life of dinosaurs the way it must have been in reality—dull, repetitive, and featureless. There was plenty of hunting and eating, lumbering and scurrying, hatching and dying, but it simply did not matter. There is nothing to like about dinosaurs. They had no personalities, no engaging qualities. And to their immense credit, the producers did not attempt to suggest otherwise.

I am, of course, untrained as a scientist, and I cannot offer a technical critique of the information provided about the extinct species to which we were exposed in the show. For example, I am ignorant of the means by which the scientists deduced the timbre of baby Raptor chirps, the choreography of brontosaur mating dances, the trans-Alantic flight patterns of pterosaurs, or the ocular architecture of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Nevertheless, I feel I can vouch for the meticulous scientific accuracy of the film for two reasons. First, the scientists kept explaining how much they knew about dinosaurs, and second, if they had been making up their information, it would—at least occasionally—have verged on the interesting.

I make this point only because certain other critics of my acquaintance have expressed a certain dubiousness about what they call the “all-knowing manner” of the scientists interviewed on camera. These critics suggest that if the science of living animals is unable to answer major questions about the lives of sharks, anacondas, and homing pigeons, then paleontologists are perhaps presumptuous in deciding that dinosaurs can be satisfactorily summed up as whale-sized chickens.

My rebuttal, as I have already stated, is esthetic rather than scientific, but it is none the less certain for that. If “Dozing with Dinosaurs” is in any respect the product of imagination, that imagination is scarcely a human one. No fantasy of the human mind could manage to be as devoid of charm, beauty, creativity, and appeal as the wurld of dinosaurs captured on film by the Evolution Channel. It is indeed a masterpiece of public television.

To my list of living animals that are still mysterious to contemporary zoologists I might have added (and know I did somewhere I can’t locate) the oh so familiar white tailed deer, which many of us try hard to keep from killing us or themselves on the nation’s roads.

Why I am taking this opportunity to recommend two documentaries which show the difficulty of “figuring out” what science is chartered with finding out: what strict, objective observation can tell us about the facts of the matter. And what remains stubbornly elusive nonetheless.

The first is the documentary about white tailed deer above. For everyone who lives near farms or in the suburbs, the information provided is relatively new and hopefully helpful in your own private lives. Guaranteed, the list of stuff you don’t know about them is long and fascinating. Most importantly, they really want to live right next to us. Human development of landscapes has propelled them to a 30-fold increase in population within a century. We’re not in their way so much as they, arguably, are increasingly in our way. Watch and learn. We can work this out.

The second is a sadder piece, about a species far less successful, even though it should be an inspiring example of inter-species communication and bonding.

Science is founded on observation. But not everything can be measured. For you quant types, that’s where alarm bells should start going off on the validity of your certainties.

In the end, though, they are both mysteries. A lesson in humility we should find both thought provoking and, well, inspiring.

Ah. Whence the source of the mythology of the unicorn? Everyone who encounters a “white deer” describes the experience as mystical. Haven’t seen one myself. Hope to. Someday.

I identified her online inside of 20 minutes. She’s real. As these things go. btw at Netflix you can get an English translation. If you don’t know Norwegian.

Not like it’s some kind of spouse abuse. We’ve been watching Scandinavian movies and TV series for quite a while now. We like the intellect behind the writing we see, but we’re also baffled by the people being depicted. There’s a lassitude, a dense unwillingness to engage with critical situations and dangerous people that we just don’t recognize. Don’t mean to be abstract. The Scandinavians tend to just sit there when the shit is hitting the fan. Or they go slow in coming to the rescue when rescue is urgently, desperately needed. Even their heroes are always late, plodding, and diffident in the face of impending catastrophe.

Except for Annika Bengzton (pardon the awful French dubbing in this clip), whose show turned us on to all the other Scandinavians. My wife liked The Eagle, which I couldn’t watch because it was so dense and slow and complicated. But we both liked Lilyhammer, an American take on the difference between passive stupidity and action oriented stupidity (the former Norwegian, the latter American). And we soldiered on through Wallander (not the BBC version) together, perhaps for different reasons. She liked the stories. I liked the fact that he hated everyone without ever showing it openly. The last Viking. Gone a’glimmering. I guess it’s fair to say we endured the native language version of the Dragon Tattoo trilogy because we had grown used to Scandinavian inability to recognize emergency and had learned to wait for what they peculiarly conceive of as justice. Which might or might not just happen.

Then I found this one, a maybe horror movie though not really. It put the Scandinavian detachment front and center, to such an extreme that one of the protagonists says barely a hundred words in the whole picture.

There’s a perfect scene which exemplifies everything we grate our teeth about in Scandinavian films. The silent guy, with excellent contextual rationale, tells his partner, “Don’t touch ANYTHING.” Whereupon he leaves the room and his partner immediately starts fiddling with the knobs of a radio set, repeatedly, obsessively, irrationally. There is never any penalty for this kind of disconnect in a Scandinavian movie. Apparently, no one ever expects anyone to pay attention to anything he says. When the bad thing happens there is never an “I told you so” moment. There is only silence.

Inert silence is the Scandinavian default. They’re done in by the modern condition, too many generations of Ingemar Bergman movies and plays by Ibsen and Strindberg.

Except that there’s something underneath all that, a damaged, maybe even amputated, vitality.

Indeed, amputation is a big part of The movie Thale. But for once we’re not subjugated by the Nordic welfare state, even though it rears its head in the most frightening possible way in the climax of the film. Instead, we are returned to the mythic past of a Norway that just barely exists anymore. Whence the Vikings? Whence the Norse passion? Here. On a shoestring budget. The detached are reattached. The past consumes the present. The old ways win.

Glorious.

Yeah. She liked it too.

I actually remember being 13. Does that make me special?

All right. I admit this is a diversion. Since I posted the previous post, large white cars have been driving by the house. They have drilled, stainless steel hubcaps and driver side spotlights. I think the men inside are wearing cheap black suits. So it seems like a good idea to put something else up as the first thing people see. Maybe, if I’m dumb enough, they’ll overlook what I wrote a bit ago.

I told my wife that now I’m well into my sixties I’ve become obsessed with sex. She thinks that’s okay. But there’s no telling what turn it will take. Because I’m old and perverse and far less energetic than Tiger Woods. Why I started pondering History/Discovery/Nat-Geo channel documentaries about Neanderthals.

They’re all obsessed with the same thing these days. DNA. Is there any chance Neanderthals disappeared only because they converged with Cro-Magnons? Or did they just die off because they weren’t smart enough to keep up?

Yeah. I keep watching. But all the shows are about DNA, whether you can get it from bones or Neanderthal teeth, and if you get a positive cross pollination result is it contamination? Would early homo sapiens have had incentive to breed with big clumsy Neanderthals, and if so, why and how? Or is any sign of DNA combination, well, contamination? And why do I keep watching these silly shows that always end with the narrator intoning, “It’s a mystery.”

I have some answers. Now that I’m well into my sixties.

You see, those of us who are that old and had virtuous parents did not have a supply of Playboy magazines to raid in Dad’s bottom drawer. Our whole knowledge of female anatomy came from yellowing copies of the National Geographic. Being from a highly educated, thoroughly Episcopalian, and ridiculously naive WASP clan, I discovered that my sainted grandparents had a 30 year collection of the National Geographic magazine stored in the attic. Eureka!

They have breasts on the Amazon River. They have breasts and buttocks in the Ubangi tribe of Africa. And the Neanderthals have all of that and pubic hair too.

There was no sex education in those days. You took it where you could get it. I must concede that my mother was a Mickey Spillane fan, and I learned a lot by borrowing the paperbacks hidden under the towels on the bathroom shelf. (A lot.) Also, we had huge color-plate editions of the masterpieces on display at the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre, and did I mention the Uffizi Gallery? Who else do you know whose first intense moment of pleasure was watching Hera create the Milky Way, never mind how. (She was naked when she did it if that helps.)

But National Geographic was always the nuts and bolts of female anatomy. The way they really looked. Which was wonderful.

The photographs were great, though mostly black and white. You want more. Which is where the artists’ renditions of cave women came into play. Don’t know who those artists were, but they captured the ultimate attraction of wild women. They don’t know, don’t care, aren’t concerned at all about being stark naked.

As I said. Funny. The anthropologists can wonder all they want. Truth is, of COURSE Cro-Magnons would have mated with Neanderthal women. Everyone from 13 to 18 would have taken the plunge without a second thought. Probably the older guys too.

Solving the question of whether or not there’s Neanderthal DNA in homo sapiens. Of course there is. Have you ever been to a mall? A mall in Kentucky?

Sorry. Cheap joke. I see Neanderthals at the Christiana Mall outside Wilmington, DE, and Cherry Hill, NJ, too.

There’s also this movie. About a guy from my home state.

I rest my case. Do you get the funny? The academics could have saved themselves years of research and hundreds of hours of documentaries. But that would be against their Cro-Magnon nature. They’re so sapiens.

Cars still driving by… If you don’t hear from me in a few days, do NOT call 911. Wouldn’t be good for your health.

P.S. Okay. Since one of my oldest friends insisted, here’s a link to my first erotic experience ever. Full disclosure: I was 11, which makes it 50 years ago almost exactly. Why I indulge a single time in TMI. Meanwhile, my wife is telling me to watch out for descending ladders from helicopters. Just so we’re keeping everything in perspective here.